Entertainment Weekly vs. The Gargoyle

Before the recession, publishers were making it rain on untested writers and none more so than on Andrew Davidson. For his debut novel, The Gargoyle (2008), Doubleday gave him a whopping $1.25 million but even with a spot on the NYT Bestsellers, it faded into obscurity, no thanks to the Entertainment Weekly review of the book that got everyone into an uproar and had most agreeing that it just wasn’t worth the hoopla.

Entertainment Weekly’s best “oh snap” moment was this: “This much-hyped book is eye-bulgingly atrocious, packed with medieval history to disguise prose that’s worse than your average Dungeons & Dragons blog.”

Some said that the people who defended it so valiantly were pretending they were deeper than most, by looking beyond the plot about an ex porn star who spends over 200 pages in a burn unit only to fall in love with a mysterious tattooed woman who might be from the 14th century. This was the book that was touted to be “the next The DaVinci Code”. Bookstores were told to prepare for the high demand that never came. If you like your novels to have lines like,

“Being burned was the best thing that ever happened to me because it brought you.”

or

“…and I wanted to rappel it like a mozzarella commando to storm her lovely breasts.”

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Nicolina Torres

Nikki worked for Barnes & Noble for 15 years, in seven stores. She is the author of This Red Fire, Young Nation, and Girls Who Wear Glasses. She prefers to live in the country and is a new aunt to a potential bookworm.